[Leica] Parks and frustration

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Mark writes:

I check the Park list to see which one was the most visited I recalled it

being not far from NYC which might explain it. Proximity.

What turns up this time I'm not recognizing.

#1 is the The Blue Ridge in Virginia. Not that far from here really but that

was not it.

#3 is Gateway National Recreation Area.

An odd one. It's in Brooklyn.

And scattered around into other places like Staten Island.

A kind of Endocrine system National park.

Isolated seemingly unrelated areas.

- - - - - -

The Gateway National Park is a recent creation of the Park Service which
ties together all of the Federal waterside property on the edge of Staten
Island, Brooklyn and Long Island plus some other lands owned by NYC and the
NY state. These are mostly beaches, barrier islands, sand flats, marshes,
etc. Putting them all together under the protection of the Park Service is a
good idea. We used to picnic on the Staten Island shore near Great Kills. It
is a lovely area and is a favorite for secluded photo shoots in the New York
area. I am told that a lot of porn movies are filmed there.

The Blue Ridge Parkway may well be the most visited - but it is not really
visited, just driven through. It parallels Rt. 81 from NY state to Georgia
and offers a respite from sharing the highway with kamikaze trucks. We take
it every time we drive to visit my son's family in Atlanta. There are
numerous photo vista stops but we rarely see people get out of their cars
and hike along the trails. Top speed is 45 mph (75 kph for enlightened
Europeans and Canadians) so you have plenty of time to smell the roses and
see the beautiful scenery. I'll post a couple of pics as soon as I get my
photo computer straightened out.

Which brings me to my real problem. I loaded Snow Leopard OS 10.6 on my
iMac, found that it wouldn't run some of my needed programs and reloaded
plain vanilla Leopard OS 10.5. Unfortunately Apple makes it difficult to
regress. Loading an older operating system resets all system related
programs to their virgin mode. I lost all my Mail addresses and had to
reconstitute my iPhoto Libraries from the images on a backup disc. If your
Apple computer works well with the older system, think twice before leaping
to Snow Leopard. I shudder to think of the problems that MS addicts will
suffer with Windows 7.

Larry Z